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Poetic Profile

Chris Daniels

General Questions

1) Where were you Born and What was your Formation?

I was born in New York Hospital on Manhattan Island in 1956. I went to a bunch of different schools. In sixth grade, I became a total fuck-up and started getting into trouble, was suspended numerous times, expelled more than once... I dropped out of highschool. Never went to college. Always loved books, always read a lot, still do. 

My father, David Daniels, is a pretty well-known poet in certain circles. He’s terrific -- utterly unique. When I was a boy, he was a painter and a ceramicist. I spent a lot of time in his loft on Canal Street and used to paint with him. He’s written at least two novels that I know of. My mother wanted to be a jazz singer, and in the last decade of her life, she finally began to do gigs around NYC. But she also wrote poetry, acted in plays and designed and made clothing. My sister was incredibly talented in everything she chose to do. The arts have been a constant in my life from day one, and I was always encouraged. Both my parents took me to the movies all the time. My mother took me to concerts and jazz clubs. She worked at the Village Vanguard. There was always music playing, everything from Copland to Coltrane. I figured out very early on that there’s nothing special about being an artist, that an artist is no more or less exalted than a carpenter or a cook or a waiter or a janitor or a garbage collector, you’d better learn how to fix your own toilet, etc.

2) What are your Poetic Influences?

My father and mother always read poetry to me. When I was 13, my father gave me a copy of the Urquhart/Motteux translation of Rabelais, and I loved it immediately. I go back to that book constantly. As I revel in excess, it all starts with Quevedo, Góngora and Sor Juana and the English poets we call “metaphysical” because we can’t bear to use the word “baroque” to describe Milton, Crashaw and Donne. The Latin American neo-baroque is terribly important to my sense of poetry.

3) When did you become a poet?

I think of myself as a worker, a citizen, a human being. I’ve always read poetry, and I’ve always written “my own” poetry (though never a lot of it and it takes forever). It was when I stopped caring about being a poet that I began to do something that I felt I must.

4) When did you first translate Brazilian writing? 

It all began when I was working as a dishwasher in a restaurant in Cambridge, MA when I was a teenager, right after I dropped out of highschool. My shift overlapped with the other dishwasher’s. He was one of the many Brasilian musicians attending the Berklee School of Music in Boston at the time. I was a bass player, so we got to talking. His English was pretty bad, and my Portuguese at the time was non-existent, but because I’d been working in kitchens for a while, I’d picked up enough Spanish to communicate with people, so we did OK. He was always singing these gorgeous songs and some of it was vaguely comprehensible to me. He told me which LPs to buy. I also had a friend who had a number of LPs from Brasil. The first Brasilian albums I heard all the way through were “Edu e Bethânia” on Elenco and “Le Monde Musical de Baden Powell” on Barclay. Totally mind-blowing. That relaxed virtuosity killed me. Then I learned about Milton Nascimento, Egberto Gismonti, Elis Regina, Tropicália, Noel Rosa, Cartola. I just had to know what they were singing about, so I bought a Portuguese grammar and a good dictionary and started translating as best I could. As you know, MPB lyrics of the 60’s and ‘70’s are extraordinarily sophisticated and operate on many levels and I was teaching myself so it was a gradual process. When I was in my late 30’s, I realized what I should be doing, so I got a private tutor and she introduced me to Fernando Pessoa. Then I found out about Murilo Mendes and, a little later, Josely Vianna Baptista. That really clinched it for me.

5) Favorite Team or Sport?

When I was a kid, baseball, of course. BOB GIBSON! The Russian gymnast Yelena Produnova impressed the hell out of me a few years ago. She never get really famous, but that’s mostly because she was dark, intense and powerful -- really a joy to watch in all her strength and commitment; she should be a role model for all of us. I like to watch futebol in BR with my friends there, for the fun of it, the conviviality. Otherwise, sports don’t register all that much.

6) Food?

Probably because I eat them only in Brasil: the supernatural farofa at Bar de Odilon in Costa do Dentro, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina; bacalhau as prepared by Cukas, the chef at Açor, which is within walking distance of Bar de Odilon and Pântano do Sul. Cukas is an amazing cook, and she and her husband, Pedro, are total sweethearts overflowing with ternura brasileira. I was a cook for 20 years, and yet I have no idea how Cukas does what she does with a simple salad. She’s a real artist. Anchova grelhada; a real moqueca with dendê; açaí em gelo, sprinkled with granola and diced apples; Guaraná is the greatest soft drink in the world, and sometimes I can get it here; caldo de cana (now banned, sadly). Feijoada completa, of course. A churrascaria is a wondrous thing. I like all leafy greens. Noodles, all kinds of noodles. Pho Hoa Lao in Oakland is the fucking omphalos. There’s a Taiwanese beef noodle soup called Nie-Ro-Mien. I probably misspelled it.

7) Vacation Spot?

Floripa -- Ao Sul da Ilha!

8) Swear Word?

Fuckwit. Motherfucker. Shit for all vanguards, political and artistic! I like all Brasilian obscenity.

9) As you know I am an unapologetic Catholic writer, what is your opinion of religion and spirituality? In writing?

This question demands a 6-hour conversation at the kitchen table, you know? But I’ll answer as best I can.

I went searching around your site, and I found the following question to another poet. “As most poets are cynical hipsters, mysticism is normally a problem in the poetry world. How do you overcome this reality?” I’d like to answer this one, too.

The poets who have honored me with their friendship aren’t normally very cynical, though cynicism is one of those things everyone falls into now and then. Nor are they hipsters. Some of them are intensely spiritual and some of them are hard-edged materialists. However, in this land of at least 10,000 poets off the academic production line, it’s hard not to be cynical about poetry.

Cynical Hipsterism (aka Coolness) is my bugbear. Coolness is a refuge from contradictory social relationships, and all social relationships are contradictory. In general, the more Cool, the more clueless about truly important human issues. Coolness is a sad and useless attempt to compensate for spiritual and political confusion. It’s a sure sign of unsurmountable social discomfort. So much for hipsters, the poor things...

I’m an anarcho-socialist. More specifically, an non-sectarian internationalist with a deep sympathy for anarchism. Neither of my parents ever told me that I should or shouldn’t believe in God. So I don’t even like to call myself an atheist because the idea of a supreme entity of any kind is totally foreign to me. I’m a materialist, but I’m not against religion. Nor am I anti-spiritual.

A lot of people make the ignorant claim that religion is the cause of war and oppression. But it’s very important to understand not only that war is the ultimate cash cow, but also is the most obviously savage form of mass oppression. Oppression is necessary to maintain exploitive social relationships in class societies. As long as we live in a class society, we will be denied the ability to meet rationally the needs of all members of our community, which is all of humanity. Nation-states are artificial constructs that serve to maintain exploitative social relationships that benefit the various ruling elites of the world. Under capitalism, all wars are waged for the benefit of ruling elites. Religion has been and is still being used as an excuse and a pretext. It can be a powerful tool for propagandists.

Marx’s famous quote is usually taken out of context. Allow me to quote the entire paragraph from “Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Opium kills pain and causes the user to dream.

If a Great Satan exists in the world, it is capitalism, which lost its revolutionary potential a long, long time ago, and which has deformed all social relationships, all decent human values. When religion and religious people act in resistance to the ruling elites and work to help people transform themselves through real struggle, as has happened in Latin America and elsewhere, as you know very well, all radicals rejoice.  We mourn the deaths of people like Bishop Oscar Romero and Martin Luther King at the hands of murderers acting in the interest of the ruling elite. We abhor the rape, torture and murder of women like Sister Dianna Ortiz at the behest of parasitical scum like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and the gangster CEOs who control their every action. But I have a lot of trouble with people who dream about a vague, unproven afterlife when they ought to be attentive to all life on earth and deeply concerned about the struggle for the future of humanity.

As for religion/ mysticism/ spirituality in writing, well, here’s a partial list confined only to the most obvious: Dante, Teresa of Avila, Pasolini, Whitman, Hopkins, Blake, Dickinson, Sor Juana... what more can you say? There’s a similar stupid prejudice against politics in poetry, that pathetic “dream of an apolitical poetry” that James Scully demolishes in his great book, Line Break. To paraphrase Scully, if you told Walt Whitman that there was no place for religion, mysticism or politics in poetry, he’d call you a fucking moron and you’d deserve it.

9) You are Josely Vianna Baptista’s translator what were the challenges in working with a Brazilian and woman writer?

I have no critical distance from Josely’s poetry and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. She and Francisco Faria and their son Jero are good friends of mine and I care for them very much.

It’s extremely important to recognize and study the hard, cold reality of gender oppression in society and in my own consciousness. While it’s very true that politics is the art of wielding and managing power over others, it’s equally true that politics is the means by which people inform and transform themselves through struggle. I struggle continuously against the phony subject-positions that reside in me (translating helps tremendously), and the major challenges in translating Josely’s poetry have to do with gender only insofar as they contribute to the above-mentioned struggle. Otherwise, it’s all about the poetry.

Josely isn’t the only woman poet I translate, by the way. I also translate non-heterosexual poets and poets who are people of color. There’s no advantage in ideological squeamishness.

It’s always about the poetry. It’s always about whether or not the poems demand that I translate them. Some do and some don’t and it’s always changing. Sometimes it turns out that I’m incapable of translating a certain poet’s work. That changes, too. But Josely’s poems are very special to me and this has everything to do with intellectual, emotional and aritistic correspondences.

For me, Josely’s poetry is extravagantly beautiful; her formidable technique, intellect, emotional honesty and artistic integrity result in something that leaves me gaping. Her poems are examples of soulful virtuosity. Translating her is a joy; like Clarice Lispector says, “it’s such an Alleluia.” Her poetry demands that I dig very deep and find things that I never really knew were in me. That’s challenging, but it’s a challenge that I cherish trying to meet.

Josely is a consummate translator, so she knows what goes into a translation. Because her practice as a translator is transcreative, to riff on Haroldo de Campos’ wonderful coinage, she understands that her poems in English can and in many cases should be very different from her poems in Portuguese. Not only does she accept that, she also welcomes it, insists upon it. She trusts my instincts.

I translate Josely’s poetry in a close collaboration with her and Francisco, who is a tremendously gifted visual artist and a literate and impassioned reader. She and Francisco and I think alike in many ways. When I’m in Brasil, everything moves much more quickly. I go to Josely and/ or Francisco and ask for advice on a word for a phrase or suggest a solution to something that’s been bugging me. I bring things up at the dinner table, over lunch, any old time. Sometimes we talk for a long time about a couple of words. It’s got everything to do with conviviality and solidarity and the simple pleasure that people derive from working together.

I’m not suggesting that translating Josely’s poetry is easy (it took 4 years to translate one fairly brief book!), but its many difficulties are a source of fascination -- jubilant fascination --, and that keeps me going. I’m committed to translating every poem she’s written or will write and that she intends to keep. Josely knows this and that’s one of the reasons why she and Francisco collaborate so closely and generously with me. Another reason is that we all respect each other as artists. Therefore, the only real problematical challenge comes from difficulties in communication that are caused by our living in different time zones. Email helps, but it’s always better to be able to talk in person.

10) How do you write a poem?

Usually, I translate poems by other people. It’s pretty much the same. Not much to say about it, really. I start. I show fair copies to people whose opinion I trust. Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes a month, sometimes years.

11) So much of poetry today is dominated by academics and professional ‘poets’ you are not one of these what do you think of the current scene, its myopia and what needs to be done to shake up poetry in the US?

I don’t think anything can be done until society changes. The society we live in demands greed, competition, place-seeking, careerism. It’s hard to resist regnant ideologies. In fact, most people don’t even realize these ideologies exist.

The MFA in creative writing is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Poets  working toward an MFA should learn another language extremely well and spend a great deal of their creative time translating, which would develop an acute historical sense of their own poetry’s place in the world. A little humility never hurts. That would also help to counter the restrictions placed upon poetry in our universities, which are devoted to reproducing extreme North American chauvinism and palatable, corporate homogeneity. Sometimes that homogeneity is disguised with a few rough edges, so it looks like “avant-gardism” or whatever you like to call it, but it’s all the same. We really do need to know what’s going on in the huge world outside the northern centers of accumulation.

Poetry is an art, everybody knows that. As with music or painting or any other medium, you can insist on technical mastery and expose people to amazing things, but you can only encourage people to think and feel deeply and avoid empty virtuosity in the practice of art. You can try to help people understand that art is a cognition of reality. You can encourage people to have a healthy attitude toward what they do. Beyond that, and artist has to learn the basic and advanced skills, there’s no way around it.

12) Is poetry a synthetic or organic process for you?

Synthetic, in the sense of it being the product of my experience over the course of 49 years on earth, which includes all my reading in more than one language. Organic, in that it comes out of my body and is the struggle through which I self-transform. Somewhere between the two, deep in the artist’s Keatonesque, virtuosic pratfall toward some human truth, is where the spiritual abides and thrives.

13) Where do you write? Is ambience important for you?

I can work anywhere and can put up with anything, as long as nobody interrupts me when I want to be left alone. I get a lot of work done on public transportation. Ambience is unimportant, but I feel adrift without two Pelikan Souveran fountain pens (one for black ink, one for red) and a Yard-O-Led Retro mechanical pencil. I usually write longhand in the cheapest possible steno notebooks. I type into a plain text editor called Textpad. Later, I move the data to WYSIWYG.

14) In the space between created language and found language where do you fall?

We are raised and then re-create ourselves and find others like us in very large part through language, which is our greatest invention. It’s said that we live inside language, but the real truth of the matter is that human language is a collective endeavor that has been going on for a million years, give or take. We wouldn’t be who we are without language, and our languages wouldn’t exist without us. It’s a dialectical process; there’s no end to it: languages never stop evolving until they stop being used by people. Certain poets have suggested that language is bigger and smarter than us. To me, that sounds like a confused mystification of the most retrogressive variety. It’s like saying that a chisel is more skillful than the artisan who wields it. I don’t have a metaphysical conception of language. People make and use language. It it ours.

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